Brinkley: A barbaric custom in Kyrgyzstan

Saturday

Dec 10, 2011 at 12:30 AM

JOEL BRINKLEY

On her final full day in office, President Roza Otunbayeva of Kyrgyzstan became the first senior Kyrgyz official to forcefully denounce “bride kidnapping,” an entrenched custom in her Central Asian state.

“Bride kidnapping is a tradition of the Kyrgyz people,” she acknowledged as she was preparing to leave the presidential palace on Nov. 29. “But these crimes often force women to commit suicide.”

Young men kidnap about 15,000 girls each year, Otunbayeva said. They simply grab a girl walking down the street, stuff her in the car, kicking and screaming, and take her home. He may rape her — or not. Either way, after she’s locked up overnight in an unrelated man’s house, the girl is unfit to wed anyone else. Her family won’t permit her to come home. So she’s forced to marry her kidnapper.

No one keeps precise statistics, but estimates suggest that half of Kyrgyz wives are married in this way. The outgoing president urged her people to stop romanticizing bride kidnapping and inaugurated a month-long campaign to fight the practice. But then the new president, Almazbek Atambayev, had nothing to say about this as he took office — though admittedly he was preoccupied. The next day his ruling coalition collapsed.

Around the world, numerous nations cling to longstanding traditions that, to Western eyes, seem barbarous — or worse. Most of them victimize girls.

In Northwestern Thailand, I interviewed a woman, one of many, preparing to sell her 12-year-old daughter to traffickers who would force her into prostitution. The mother intended to use the trafficker’s payment for her daughter to buy a new refrigerator. “It’s our tradition,” she explained.

In Saudi Arabia, centuries-old religious convention allows middle-aged men to marry prepubescent girls — some as young as 7 or 8 years old.

Pakistani officials use gang rape as a government-sanctioned punishment.

In Cameroon “breast ironing” remains an honored custom. After their daughters reach puberty, mothers heat a flat rock in the fire and then press it forcefully onto each of her daughter’s breasts — burning away breast tissue, leaving them flat-chested so avaricious young men will leave them alone.

“Breast ironing has existed as long as Cameroon has existed,” gynecologist Sinou Tchana told the Inter Press news service. Women “told us that it was normal for them.”

If it’s “normal for them,” how should Western societies regard practices like these? Anthropology’s “cultural relativism” rule suggests that we should not judge other countries by the standards of our own society. But some acts are just too vile, and cultural courtesies don’t stop human-rights groups from wagging their fingers at these states.

“Kyrgyzstan’s government is allowing domestic violence and the abduction of women for forced marriage to continue with impunity,” Human Rights Watch declared. “Many Kyrgyz officials portray bride kidnapping as a harmless ritual, a voluntary practice.” But Kyrgyzstan “must prosecute perpetrators of domestic violence and kidnapping to the fullest extent of the law.”

Human Rights Watch issued that report in 2006. It did no good. In the following years, Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, lectured the government about bride kidnapping. So did the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. The U.N. Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur for Kyrgyzstan reprimanded the nation’s leaders, and a representative from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe declared the practice “a violation of women’s rights.”

Their admonitions accomplished little if anything. Now, however, awareness is finally rising among the Kyrgyz themselves, and change may be coming — as the president’s parting statement suggested. Last spring, 200 people staged a small rally in Bishkek, the capital, protesting on behalf of two kidnapped girls who committed suicide rather than succumb to marriage. That was a first.

Then, late last month, the Association of Crisis Centers in Kyrgyzstan announced that it is staging “awareness campaigns in 13 villages to inform villagers that bride kidnapping is a crime.”

As barbaric as we may view bride kidnapping, breast ironing and other hideous practices, most often human-rights lectures have little actual effect. Change must come from within.

It’s no coincidence that most places preying mercilessly on their young are desperately poor. Kyrgyzstan’s average annual income is $870; in Cameroon it’s $1,170. And Kyrgyzstan’s Red Crescent Society seems to realize that economic development is the only effective solution.

A few weeks ago, it began what it calls “a program to improve the social and economic position of 50,000 vulnerable women” who are often “the victims of bride kidnappings.”

That’s a heartening effort, worthy of widespread support.

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Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times.

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